BOUNDARY-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF HEAT-CONDUCTION AND THERMAL-STRESSES IN CONTACT PROBLEMS USING INDEPENDENT MESHING

This paper presents a new implementation of the boundary element metho d in contact problems involving heat conduction and thermal stresses. This formulation, which is an extension of the elastostatic contact fo rmulation previously published by the present authors, allows independ ent meshing of the contact surfaces and frictional stick-slip. Three c ontact formulations for heat conduction problems are presented; a conv entional node-on-node approach, a length mapping procedure and a ficti tious node approach. The latter two approaches allow independent discr etization of the contacting surfaces. The output from the heat conduct ion analysis is automatically fed into the elastic analysis as body fo rces in order to compute the thermal stresses and displacements. Sever al practical problems are presented and the results from the three app roaches are shown to be in good agreement with each other and with oth er available solutions.